Friday, July 1, 2011

President Hugo Chavez acknowledged Thursday night that he had a cancerous tumor.

He made the admission in a late-night speech, his first since falling ill 21 days ago.

Chavez was last in Venezuela on June 6 when he left for a three-country tour of Ecuador, Brazil and Cuba. On what was to be the last day of the trip, June 10, he fell ill during a meeting in Cuba and was operated on for a pelvic abscess.

He gave a radio address two days later, but hasn’t been back to his home country in three weeks.

The Venezuelan and Cuban governments this week released photographs and videos of a visibly slimmer Chavez chatting happily with Castro. The video showed him reading a current copy of the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde, giving the production the feel of a proof-of-life video used in kidnappings.